


To Stars and Beyond

by satonawall



Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-15
Updated: 2015-04-15
Packaged: 2018-03-23 03:46:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3753304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/satonawall/pseuds/satonawall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Santana is an intergalactic thief, and Brittany is her escape plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Stars and Beyond

Santana allowed herself a second to smile down at the Magnetic Jewel of Magnestell before sliding it into her pocket and wriggling herself back into the air vent.  
  
She had ten minutes to make it to the other end of the palace and leave by the hydrogen delivery door before the guards noticed anything was missing.  
She made it in seven minutes, so she had time to take a two-minute break and enjoy the heavy weight of the Jewel in her pocket.  
  
In a minute, there would be a planet-wide call for people to stay still while the police would go around asking them to pass through one of the giant magnets that Magnestellars used to detect stolen property, but that didn’t apply to Santana.  
  
It had been a master stroke of an idea, really. She’d had the plans to seal the crown jewel and the pride of the whole planet for months, but they’d just been lacking a suitable escape route.  
  
That was, until she looked up from her Supernova Scotch one evening and saw a woman with a horn protruding out of her forehead smile at her from the other side of the serving area.  
  
She’d gone over because the woman – Brittany, she’d found out – was hot, and she’d gone back to Brittany’s ship both because Brittany was sweet and funny and because Santana had sold her own ship to fund her stay at Magnestell.  
  
She had, however, stayed until morning because it turned out that Brittany was a Special Ambassador to Magnestell from Cornia, come to discuss a shared sulphur forest protection scheme, and one of the perks of the diplomatic clearance was that neither she nor her company had to walk past the magnetic detectors. That, and because Brittany had brought her a glass of water after they were done and told her tales about Cornian wild forests until Santana fell asleep.

Santana had played her cards really well after that, even if she said so herself. She hadn’t hid her financial situation or desire to get a new start from Brittany, and she’d deftly tied that into the magnificent images Brittany had painted of her home planet. Soon enough, Santana was invited on the return flight back to Cornia, and she really didn’t need to fake her excitement when Brittany asked her.  
  
She did, however, feel bad about using Brittany like that.  
  
“Hi!” Brittany said as Santana arrived at the coffee a little out of breath but a minute before they’d agreed on and, hopefully, ten minutes before the Magnestellar magnets would reach the place. “I already got you a Saturnine ring but I thought you’d be a little late so I didn’t get your Earth coffee.”  
  
“It’s okay,” Santana put her hand on Brittany’s arm; the gesture felt more natural than it probably should have, “I’m not really in a coffee sort of mood anyway.”  
  
Neither of them was particularly fond of the Magnestellar coffee shop furniture so they linked their pinkies and set out for Brittany’s ship in what probably felt to Brittany like the only logical course of action.  
  
“Are we leaving in an hour?” Santana asked, resisting the urge to push her hand into her pocket to make sure the Jewel was still there. “I can’t wait to see the Bowing Raintrees, they sound amazing.”  
  
“And ten minutes.” Brittany tilted her head, the horn just narrowly not clashing against a banner crossing the street above their heads warning them about the dangers of magnetocars and the importance of looking left, right and up before crossing the main road. “Maybe just seven if Quinn is angry enough at the motors.”  
  
Santana laughed. She’d met Quinn. “What, you mean Quinn’s anger is not the motor?”  
  
“That could work as a power source.” Brittany pursed her lips. “I should ask if she can harness it somehow.”  
  
They reached the docks five minutes before Santana had estimated they would be on high alert, but it was obvious that the news had already reached the guards who were not standing motionless like usually but running around like no one remembered where they even kept emergency search equipment.  
  
“What’s all this commotion?” Santana asked very believably. “I don’t remember it being this busy earlier.”  
  
Brittany moved her hand, almost brushing against the pocket where the Jewel was, so that she was holding Santana’s hand instead of just her pinkie holding Santana’s.  
  
“I don’t know,” she said, “but no one cares about forest protection so much that they’d work this much for it here, so it’s none of my business.”  
  
The guard on the entrance to the diplomatic clearance portal was still standing in his usual spot, but otherwise he seemed as agitated as the rest of them.  
  
“Is everything alright?” Brittany asked in that sweet tone of hers. “This kind of movement would power your whole planet if you kept it up.”  
  
“No, Madam Ambassador, Miss,” he nodded curtly at Santana, “everything is not alright. Would you be so kind as to call your whole entourage to your ship as soon as possible to make a total search of the population easier? If they stay on actual Magnestellar soil, I’m afraid that amounts to waiving their right to diplomatic-“  
  
“We are the last ones,” Brittany said, waving her Milky Way so much the crème almost dropped onto the floor. “Just wanted to get some of your excellent pastries before leaving.”  
  
The guard let them in, not even bothering to look at their papers – Brittany was, admittedly, hard to forget, and it had nothing to do with the horn.  
  
“They all look like ants,” Santana said as they were waiting to be teleported to the ship, the capital stretching for miles below them. “And they have the same petty concerns, too. Except ants are nicer. They bite you when you threaten them.”  
  
“What are ants?”  
  
“It’s an Earth thing. Small creatures. Might as well be ruling the place now, as far as I know.”  
  
“I should propose a diplomatic mission to find out,” Brittany said. “Sounds fascinating.”  
  
The teleporter activated and in just a few seconds, Santana was high on the sky on a diplomatically protected ship with the greatest treasure of the entire Nalatrix galaxy in her pocket, without having had to even fight anyone.  
  
It was almost too good to be true.  
  
“Do you want to have a nap?” Brittany asked.  
  
It could have been a euphemism, but considering it was Brittany, it could have just been an honest question. Either way, the answer was same.  
  
“Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.”  
  
It turned out it had not been a euphemism, but Santana had had to work quite a lot more that day than she could seem to have, so that might have even been the more pleasant option.  
  
Waking up to the steady hum of the engines alone, though, was not the most pleasant way Santana could have imagined; Brittany was more likely than not to realise what she’d helped to accomplish once the news of the Magnetic Jewel disappearing spread, and not only would Santana have to make sure she wasn’t with Brittany when that happened, she also couldn’t come back after. It would have been nice to spend some more time together while they still could, but she pushed that thought out of her mind as quickly as possible. That ship had sailed, nothing she could do about it. She quickly checked that the Jewel was still in her pocket – with any luck, she’d get some sort of storage space soon to hide it in – and put her clothes back on, leaving Brittany’s bedroom.  
  
“Hello, Santana,” Blaine said as she ran into him in the corridor. “Brittany said you might wake up. She’s in the conference room.”  
  
Santana thanked him and then spent the next fifteen minutes trying to figure out where the conference room was, too stubborn to go back to Blaine and ask.  
  
Eventually she pushed open the right door, revealing Brittany alone by a very large table toying with a small monitor.  
  
“Hi,” Santana said. “You woke up earlier than I did.”  
  
“I set an alarm that only my ears will hear.” Brittany set aside the monitor. “Would you sit down? Now that we’re in outer space and no one can leave, I have a proposition for you.”  
  
The words were alarming, but Brittany’s tone was not, so Santana sat down.  
“That was an interesting opening line.”  
  
“I know someone who knows someone,” Brittany said. “And my someone’s someone really wants to buy that Magnetic Jewel of Magnestellar that you have in your pocket.”  
  
Santana’s throat went dry.  
  
“What jewel?” she managed to croak out.  
  
“You know which one I mean,” Brittany said. “There’s only one that exists. You stole it and I know someone who knows someone who wants to buy it.”  
  
Santana took a deep breath that Brittany hopefully didn’t see her take.  
“I take it it wasn’t such good luck after all that I happened to go back to your ship with someone with diplomatic clearance, was it?”  
  
“I’d say it was still good luck,” Brittany said. “I was just supposed to befriend you as my side mission, the sex was just good luck because you were so great. But no, it wasn’t happenstance.”  
  
Santana squared her shoulders. “How much?”  
  
“Of what?”  
  
“Money. How much is your someone’s someone offering?”  
  
Brittany quoted a figure. It was high, very high, a good first bid on such a unique item, but Santana could have got more if she sold the Jewel on her own terms.  
  
There, of course, was the rub.  
  
“And if I decline? I saw that airlock on the way here, I’m pretty sure I know what they’re used for unofficially.”  
  
“Ah.” Brittany looked down at her hands. “It wasn’t really a proposition, I just said it was because that sounds nicer. Someone’s someone is giving you that money and taking the Jewel, I just thought it would make the rest of the journey to Cornia more pleasant if you agreed to it before finding out about that.”  
  
Santana raised an eyebrow. “No airlocks? Really?”  
  
“I take not littering space very seriously,” Brittany said. “And besides, I like you. It’s an abuse of power to put someone in an airlock just because you can.”  
  
Santana considered pointing out that it was also an abuse of power to smuggle priceless artefacts away from a planet using your diplomatic immunity, but it didn’t seem worthwhile.  
  
“In that case,” she said, “I guess there’s nothing else for me to do but to accept your proposition.”  
  
“Great.”  
  
They shook hands, and then mercifully Brittany showed Santana to a cabin of her own so that Santana could just lay down again and try to get her head around what had just happened.  
  
—  
  
The rest of the journey was weird. She couldn’t look at Brittany the same way, and since both of them had been acting for the entirety of their acquaintance, she couldn’t act the same way around her either.  
  
At least after a few nights of no money going missing from her safe and no one trying to sneak in to kill her, Santana could rest a little more easily about the honorableness of the deal she’d struck.  
  
Still, she was both relieved and astonished when she actually made it to Cornia free of shackles and in one piece.  
  
“Pleasure making business with you,” she said as Brittany accompanied her out of the ship.  
  
“Pleasure making pleasure with you, too.” Brittany looked a little melancholic. “It would have been nice if it had just been happenstance, too.”  
  
Santana bit her lip and made a sudden decision. If they wanted her dead they’d have done it already. She could trust them a little bit for it. Just enough.  
  
“I do have quite a lot more money now,” she said. “I’ll have to spend a lot of time spending it. Want to go get coffee?”  
  
“Yes.” Brittany’s answer was instantaneous. “It tastes a lot like mud but I’ll drink it if you’re not mad at me anymore.”  
  
“I’m not really mad at you,” Santana said, offering Brittany her hand and smiling when Brittany took it. “And it’s a figure of speech, you can just get another Milky Way if you want.”  
  
“I do feel like I just got a whole galaxy.”  
  
Santana laughed, and this time, when Brittany’s hand brushed against the pocket of her jacket, Santana didn’t have to worry.  
  
It was a lot nicer that way.


End file.
